Colour feeding have you done it?

Mekaisto said:

Colour feeding does not work for parrots.

Canaries (and many other birds) are colourful because there are pigments in their feathers that makes them coloured - these pigments are made by the bird using 'ingredients' in its diet, or they sometimes come straight from the diet itself.

With parrots however, this is not the case. Parrot feathers are not colourful due to pigments, but because of their structure - the barbs of the feather are shaped in such a way that they refract the sunlight that hits them, and the light that escapes is a particular colour - red, blue, yellow, etc. This is why a parrot will look brown or dull in the shade, and why they look duller when wet.

Most parrots do have some sort of pigment, for instance green feathers usually have yellow pigment in them. This is why you have so many 'blue' mutations of green birds - The yellow pigment is not present, leaving only the structure to give the feather colour - which is seen by us as blue (green minus yellow).

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Dinosrawr said:

Yup! There's only 3 pigments in birds, actually. Melanins (black, grays, browns), carotenoids (reds/yellows), and porphyrins (red, brown, greens).

I assume that red canaries are "colour fed" because it involves carotenoid colours, and those are affected by what is consumed and not by what is structural, which is what Mekaisto is talking about. The really bright, gorgeous colours that are "sparkly" are iridescent or non-iredescent, and they're produced by a thin layer of keratin on the barbules and by how the light interacts with it - whether it reflects or scatters.

Blues and greens are not pigment, but structure. Greens appear by an overlay of yellow pigments over blue wavelengths, like what you see in yellow and green budgies. White feathers contain no pigment, and reflect all wavelengths thus giving white.

So, based on what's been said, colour feeding will not work for a bird unless it has feather colours based off of carotenoids, which most do not. Healthy, beautiful feathers come from proper diet and sunshine.

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